Bleeding Hearts (23 page)

“I’m not cynical about everything,” Candida said. “I’m just cynical about Paul. And now that he’s dead, of course, it clears everything up. I know just what happened the last time.”

“What?”

Candida took her purse off the seat and put it on her lap. She opened it up and looked through it until she found a gold cigarette case and a gold Dunhill lighter.

“I smoke five cigarettes a year,” she told him, “always in moments of extreme stress. This stress seems to be extreme enough. What do you think?”

Fred Scherrer thought Candida DeWitt was a remarkable woman.

A
remarkable
woman.

Less than a minute after it happened, Lida Arkmanian’s mind was somewhere else, on another planet, in another dimension, lost in space. It was anywhere but there in the bed in the master bedroom of her own town house, lying stretched out against Christopher Hannaford’s side. It was doing anything but thinking about the way her body felt. Her body seemed to have parts she’d never expected the existence of. These parts were popping and shuddering and snapping like champagne inside a corked bottle. Lida thought about the tears on Hannah Krekorian’s face and about Candida DeWitt. She thought about the man she had been married to for thirty-two years, who had loved her without limit but who had not been able to make her feel like this. She thought there had to be something terribly wrong with her. She went to start all over again.

“I shouldn’t have given up cigarettes,” Christopher said out of the dark. “This is the perfect moment.” He began to stroke her hair, so gently she could barely feel it. “Lida?”

“What is it?”

“That’s never happened to you before.”

How could it be so cold under all these blankets? How could it be so
cold?
Lida pulled the quilt up to her chin. “Don’t be ridiculous, Christopher. I am—over fifty years old.”

“I don’t care if you’re over a hundred years old. That’s never happened to you before.”

Lida sat up. She had blankets all around her. It was dark. Nobody could see her. Why did she feel so exposed?

“All right,” she said. “Yes. That never happened to me before.”

Christopher put his hands behind his head and looked serious. “Did you like it?”

“Of course I liked it,” Lida said. “What wasn’t to like?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it never happened to you before because you never wanted it to happen to you. I knew a woman once who said it was too threatening. Orgasms, I mean. They made her feel too. vulnerable. So she didn’t let herself have them.”

“How did she prevent it?”

“I don’t know.”

“I think it’s all the unorthodox things you do,” Lida said carefully. It was impossible to talk about these things. It was only barely possible to think about them. “I think it’s because you don’t do—and you do—well, you know what I mean.”

“Nope. I haven’t done a single unorthodox thing yet. I haven’t even gotten out the whipped cream. Never mind the cherries.”

“Christopher.”

“Seriously,” Christopher said. “It’s because of menopause. I’ve been assuming you’ve been through menopause.”

No man of Lida Arkmanian’s generation would ever have mentioned menopause to her. Even her doctor called it “the change.” Lida was glad the room was too dark for Christopher to see her blushing.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, Christopher, I’ve been through menopause.”

“I thought so. Gregor’s always saying how you’re a year older than he is, though God knows you look ten years younger. He should watch what he eats. Anyway, the thing about menopause is, once a woman goes through it, the orthodox way, as you put it, isn’t usually the right way. It can hurt.”

“Oh,” Lida said.

“Not that I have anything against the orthodox way,” Christopher said. “I mean, I’ll do it hanging from the exposed beams in the family room if you want me to—”

“Christopher, for God’s
sake.
”

“—I was just trying to be a good sort. I have been a good sort, haven’t I? It’s been all right?”

“Yes,” Lida said. “It has been better than all right. I just wish I didn’t feel so… guilty.”

“About the sex?”

“No,” Lida told him. “No, not really. I feel embarrassed about the sex, sometimes, I mean it’s been days, Christopher, and we haven’t done anything else. Today I didn’t even open my mail. Are you like this all the time?”

“Nope. But I am when I get a chance. Why not?”

“Why not.” Lida sighed. “There doesn’t ever seem to be an answer to why not. So here we are again. Do you know you’re only two years older than my oldest son?”

“Does that bother you?”

“No.” Lida sighed again. “That doesn’t bother me either. It doesn’t bother me that half the street probably knows what we’re doing—and what does Bennis think? You come to visit her and then you just disappear.”

“Bennis is smart enough never to ask questions she doesn’t want the answers to.” Christopher sat up. “I’m going to get a bottle of that New York State champagne we were drinking this afternoon. You want some chocolate? I’m starving.”

“I’ll take a glass of champagne.”

Christopher got out of the other side of the bed, keeping his back to her. He whipped a robe around himself in no time at all and tied the belt. Lida was impressed. He had not been so careful when all this had started, and she had not told him that it embarrassed her when he walked around naked. He must have guessed.

Christopher came back to the bedroom with his arms full. He dropped the chocolate on the quilt—a little pile of heart-shaped dark-chocolate cremes from Godiva that Lida’s daughter had sent—and handed Lida a glass.

“Here you are,” he said, pouring champagne. “Do you know it’s already two o’clock in the morning?”

Lida took a sip of champagne. “It’s Hannah I feel guilty about,” she said. “Not having her here. Not wanting her here. In spite of everything she has been through.”

Christopher poured a glass for himself. “It’s not as if she didn’t have anywhere to go,” he pointed out. “Helen Tevorakian offered to take her. You didn’t abandon Hannah on Cavanaugh Street.”

“Helen Tevorakian doesn’t have half the room I do. And it’s more than that. It’s more even than that I didn’t want to send you back to Bennis’s to sleep tonight.”

“Then what is it?”

“It’s what it’s always been,” Lida said impatiently. “Always, even when we were children. I was the pretty one and she was the plain one. I got roses from secret admirers for Valentine’s Day, and Hannah got cards from Helen and me. I had six boys ask me to our senior dance, and one of the five I turned down I fixed up with Hannah. I worry it was all too much.”

“But what’s that supposed to mean, too much?” Christopher asked. “It’s not as if Hannah’s life has been one unrelieved stream of failures with men. It couldn’t have been. She was married. She has children and grandchildren.”

Lida cocked her head. “On the day Hannah was married, right after the ceremony while she was standing in the receiving line to the dinner, Daphne Tessevarian walked up to her and said it was too bad she looked so fat in her wedding dress, but once she had children it wouldn’t matter so much because she would be expected to gain weight.”

“Ouch.”

“Christopher, listen.” Lida clutched the quilt to her chest—it kept slipping—and took another sip of champagne. It felt good. It tickled. “Listen,” she said again. “Krekor is convinced that he knows Hannah and that Hannah could never have stabbed anyone, but I am not so sure. I am not so sure at all. What with Paul Hazzard, she was so happy, Christopher, she was thrilled, and then that woman showing up and everything falling all to pieces and in public like that, in front of everyone. And the man was stabbed six times at least, as if he were stabbed in anger. I don’t think Hannah could think through a murder and commit it, but I think she might be able to kill someone like Paul Hazzard in anger.”

“I think you’re jumping to a lot of conclusions. You’d have to account for the dagger. You’d have to account for a lot of things. I think it’s much more logical to suspect Candida DeWitt.”

“Yes,” Lida said softly. “We all want to suspect Candida DeWitt. It absolves us all of the responsibility.”

“I feel responsible for only one thing,” Christopher said. He finished off the last of the chocolate hearts and put his champagne glass behind him on the night table. Then he took Lida’s champagne glass out of her hand and put it on the night table too.

“Let’s go back to what we were doing,” he said. “I’ll bet you anything you want that I can get you to feel like that again.”

“I thought that was impossible,” Lida said. “I thought with men, once they—you know—I thought then they had to wait for a different night.”

“I didn’t say I could get
me
to feel that way again. I said I could get
you
to.”

“Does this have something to do with whipped cream?”

“No,” Christopher said. He stretched them both out on the sheets and then he kissed her. “Whipped cream is for when you’re bored, and I am not bored. How about you?”

“No.” Lida felt a little breathless. “I am not bored.”

“Good.”

Good?

Christopher got back under the quilt and Lida put her hand on his bare back.

He had a very nice back.

He had a very nice everything.

How long was she going to be able to get away with this?

G
REGOR DEMARKIAN DID NOT
believe he would shield anyone from the consequences of murder, not even a woman he had known all his life. He was not so sure he would remain clearheaded in the face of evidence against her. It wasn’t just a question of his having known Hannah Krekorian. It wasn’t even a question of his having liked her. The real problem was his expectations. Here was a woman he had seen day after day for the past couple of years. He wasn’t relying on what he remembered about them all from forty or fifty years ago. He had Hannah these days to consider, and Hannah these days was a heavy, talkative woman in middle age who paid more attention to the sound of her own voice than she did to what other people said to her. Hannah these days cooked too much food when her family came to visit, spent too much money on birthday and Christmas presents, and vaguely resented the very idea of Gloria Steinem. It wasn’t that women like Hannah Krekorian didn’t commit murder. Gregor had good reason to know that they committed it in batches. The problem was that they didn’t commit
this kind
of murder. If Hannah had poisoned her family one by one and collected the insurance money, or put cyanide in the candy she handed out to the children who came to her door on Halloween, or overdone the insulin injections she gave to a failing old aunt or mother—those were the kinds of murders women like Hannah committed, and only after there were half a dozen bodies on the floor did anyone realize they were crazy. This sort of thing was something else. Six stab wounds into the chest of a grown man. It didn’t fit.

The picture of him on the front page of the
Philadelphia Inquirer
didn’t fit his image of himself, but he had expected worse, so he wasn’t too upset. He’d never expected for a moment that he’d be able to escape publicity altogether. That was like believing the tooth fairy really did bring Tommy Moradanyan his quarters. Even Tommy didn’t believe that. At least the headline on the
Inquirer
was more sensible than some of them had been in the past. It said

PAUL HAZZARD FOUND DEAD

which was at least to the point. Unfortunately, the picture under the headline was not of Paul Hazzard but of Gregor coming out of the building where Hannah Krekorian had her apartment. Gregor supposed there was a picture of Paul Hazzard somewhere inside the paper. The subhead didn’t bode well either. It said

CHIEF SUSPECT IS CLOSE FRIEND OF GREGOR DEMARKIAN

as if the paper knew something neither he nor the police did. Surely Hannah was only half the chief suspect list? Surely Candida DeWitt was on it too.

Gregor got some change out of his pocket, fed it into the metal newspaper-dispensing machine, and pulled out a paper. He was standing at the corner of Calumet and Trell, half a block south of the bus stop. It was quarter after eight in the morning and he was bitterly cold. He should have taken a cab out from Cavanaugh Street, or waited until later in the day. The world wouldn’t have fallen moribund and dead if he’d had his usual breakfast at the Ararat. The case wouldn’t have solved itself either. He hadn’t been able to face it. Linda Melajian and all the Melajians connected to her, Father Tibor, old George Tekemanian, maybe even Bennis—what would he have said? What could he have said? It was much too early to assure them that everything was going to be all right.

Bob Cheswicki had asked Gregor to meet him at the police station—“first thing in the morning,” which to Bob could mean anywhere between six and nine—on Calumet. It was close enough to Cavanaugh Street so that Gregor might have walked if it had been less cold and less dark. Or maybe he wouldn’t have. He shook his head. Cavanaugh Street was such a model of urban renewal, Gregor sometimes forgot that so much of the rest of Philadelphia looked like this.

The garbage piled up in plastic bags in front of the stoops looked frozen into place. The young man standing in the doorway of the building half a block up looked furtive and faintly dangerous. Gregor wished the sun would come out. Instead, just at that moment he felt a tinge of wetness against his face, the hint of another bout of rain or snow or hail. The streets were full of slush and his feet were wet.

Gregor took one last look at the paper—“Demarkian emerges from murder scene” the caption to the front-page photograph said—and went up the street to the station. As he passed the building where the furtive young man was hiding, the young man seemed to melt into the concrete and stone. Gregor let himself into the station and got a small shock. It was an ordinary police station in many ways. It had a large waiting room with benches in the front. It had a large area of cluttered desks in the back. The two sections were divided by a long wooden counter where a fat police sergeant sat. There were a couple of pay phones on the wall directly opposite the counter. There were a set of doors in one wall of the desk section, marked
LOCK-UP, UPSTAIRS, RECORDS, AND REST ROOMS
. Gregor didn’t want to ask why the rest rooms were in a place unavailable to the general public. What really worried him was the bulletproof glass. It was everywhere. It made a wall between the desk section and the one with the benches in it, rising from the countertop in a thick sheet no one could hear through. In order to talk to the desk sergeant, you had to use a microphone system like the ones they used in prisons. Bulletproof plastic, not glass, Gregor realized, looking at it more closely. What it reminded him of was numbers joints in downtown Washington, D.C. Things had gotten so bad, even the mob didn’t feel safe. Gregor looked over the benches, which were empty. Maybe it was just too cold for any serious criminality on the streets of Philadelphia today. Gregor had been in rooms like this before. They were usually packed with people, no matter what hour of the day or night.